Ask TUAW: Arabic Mail, playing Wii, calibrating color and more

I'm trying to incorporate Quicksilver as much as possible into my iBooking, but I use Adium as my chat client. I realize that there is this little thing: http://chrismetcalf.net/blog/archives/2006/07/25/quicksilveradium-away-message-hack/ but even reading that I'm lost.

So I've got two questions. First, is there a way to get an Adium plugin for QS? Second, if not, can somebody walk me through that link? I don't know what to save the script as or where to save it or anything like that. I've never used script editor and I don't have a folder called "Actions" in my Application Support/Quicksilver folder, so what do I need to do to at least be able to set away messages from QS?

A word of warning: do _not_ use custom colour profiles in Mac OS X if you also use Fast User Switching. Doing so activates a very nasty bug which defaults you to a washed-out default RGB profile, fixable only by rebooting.

There're various workarounds up on Macoshints, but in my personal experience, none of them work unobtrusively.

Zef Houssney:

I use Arabic fonts on OS X without most of the problems you're describing. Whether you're using Text Edit or Mail, for example, make sure you go to "Format" and change the writing direction to right to left. That fixes the problems with the cursor and needing to change letters in the middle of a line, etc.

MS Office for Mac does not support Arabic--hopefully, it will in the next version; worse, as I indicated in my previous post, it hampers the ability of other programs to support Arabic, though, admittedly, that's relatively easy to fix. In terms of Arabic programs on the Mac, there are actually a few. Do a Google search. The real problem (for me, at least) is finding something that is compatible with MS Word on Windows (for when I need to email a document to someone). Mellel is a very good international word processor for the Mac. But my money is on NeoOffice because 1) it's free!!! 2) it's nearly perfectly compatible with Word, including on Windows; 3) it uses all the Arabic (and other) fonts in OS X and has near perfect implementation of right to left languages, like Arabic and Hebrew (just make sure you change the direction of the text from the drop-down menu); 4) you can download a patch that will localize the program to run as a completely Arabic app; 5) It's Free!!!

Jesse-
There's a few things you need to keep in mind when you are editing with Photoshop. The main problem here is your colorspaces, both from the camera, on the monitor, and in photoshop. But by all means, do the calibration that Mat suggested.

Here is my advice (I'm an amateur photographer, see http://www.aaronbennett.com )

1. Set your mac to gamma 2.2. Its asked when you calibrate your display.

2. Calibrate! If you can, borrow a EyeOne or even buy it if you plan to continue processing images for print or posting.

3. Make sure you take images in a good color space, or if you already have the images (or don't have the luxury of changing the way you take photos) make sure photoshop is opening the right color space. For instance, take in AdobeRGB for a nice wide gamut of colors.

4. Use the tools in photoshop to open color space, convert to a color space or set your default working space. These are Edit > Color Settings..., Edit > Assign Profile..., and Edit > Convert to Profile... Play around with those for obvious color changes.

5. Export to the color profile that will be used. Your yearbook may be printed in CMYK which natively has a larger gamut than RGB. For outputting to the web, use sRGB. When the images are opened in Safari or Firefox, they show the colors you intended.

6. You can install more color profiles, for instance many Costco photo printers have installable profiles that you can use with photoshop to get an accurate representation of the final printed colors - See if anything is available from the printers of your yearbook.

HTH! -Aaron

Whenever I click on the video icon in ichat to start a video chat, ichat starts one with the buddy one below the one i clicked. Any ideas

Conor - Use Thunderbird. Then you'll keep all formatting. It's not a clipboard issue, it's an issue of Gecko and WebKit (HTML vs Rich Text)

Thanks for the post about Arabic on OS X... I don't get to see much on that. I love that OS X has Arabic fonts and all that built-in, but I wish it was better. For instance, you can't delete any characters in within a line, so you have to start over if you want to change something.The cursor is never in the correct place, it is always at the front or the back of the line (remember, Arabic script reads from right to left), and regardless of its position it always adds to or deletes from the last character, no OS X text editors deal with this correctly (to my knowledge), but it's still great that it is a built-in feature and no extra installation is necessary. If anyone knows about any good Arabic stuff for the Mac please post it here!

Thanks....

For the spelling defaults, you may be able to modify the global defaults instead of just the application defaults:

defaults write "Apple Global Domain" ...name of default here...

I have not tested this, but it might work. (You can also look at the plist, if you can find it.)

Jesse:

About the photoshop question.. I know exactly what you mean. What you need to do is go to View>Proof Colors. The reason you see everything as desaturated is that you're not working in the correct colour space. When you save a file, especially as JPEG or PNG which does not embed the current colour profile, you're going to end up with incorrect colours.

For the Arabic problem, it might be a problem with the Arial and Times New Roman fonts installed by MS Office. Here's what you do. As a prior post noted, activate the Arabic fonts in "International" in System Preferences; by default they're already installed. You then need to go to Font Book and disable the active versions of Times New Roman and Arial (the active ones are the ones Office installed); if you want to keep using these fonts, activate the dupes, as they are the original that OS X installed. This fixes the ligatures problem in Safari (i.e., Safari will now correctly display Arabic letters--perhaps this is the reason you don't like Safari; personally I like it very much). That's what the MS Office fonts do; they break Arabic ligatures so that letters always display as separate letters rather than connected text as they're supposed to be in Arabic. Finally, having chosen Arabic from your language chooser in the Menu Bar, go to Mail. I find that I don't even need to choose Unicode manually; Mail does a fine job when it's on Automatic. The only thing you should do is go to "Format", "Alignment", and then "Writing Direction", and then choose "Right to Left" so the cursor can work properly. Tiger, while not localizing Arabic, actually handles the language perfectly fine. The key thing here is disabling the Arial and Times New Roman fonts that MS Office installed on your computer and (if you want to keep using these fonts) activating the original ones that came with OS X. I hope this helps.